Page One

Self-indulgence, pretentiousness peppers the underdog 

“Big Bad Love” is a small, bad movie about an alcoholic Southern writer who writes about being an alcoholic Southern writer, then drinks more when editors reject his drunken submissions. 

Based on the short stories of Mississippi writer Larry Brown, the film is both incoherent and pretentious. Arliss Howard, who stars as Leon Barlow and directed and co-wrote the script, relies on heavy-handed metaphors and naggingly repetitive imagery. 

Leon tacks up words and bits of phrases on the wall behind his typewriter — we see the words, then we hear him say the words, then we see the words played out in front of us. 

Leon boozes himself into oblivion and passes out, then wakes up hungover and stumbles around chain-smoking all day before repeating the cycle. Sometimes he tries to get back in the good graces of his ex-wife, Marilyn (Debra Winger, Howard’s real-life wife, in her first film role in six years). 

Sometimes his mother (Angie Dickinson) comes by to make him feel guilty about neglecting his pre-adolescent son and young daughter, who’s ill. 

Mostly he sits around drinking Maker’s Mark and cheap beer with Monroe (Paul Le Mat), his buddy from Vietnam, who is wealthy but lives like a slob in true Southern Gothic fashion. 

Leon’s inebriated reality is punctuated by stream-of-consciousness fantasy sequences. He receives an encouraging rejection letter from a New York editor, and pictures her being led through a field on horseback, wearing a sexy black cocktail dress, tossing his pages in the air one by one. 

Marilyn and their children appear to him standing in a doorway in the middle of a field — sometimes they’re in danger, sometimes they just stare at him disapprovingly. 

At least when David Lynch thrusts this kind of imagery at us, it’s interesting and it looks good. 

Howard, with his wiry frame, is reminiscent of Ed Harris as the tormented artist Jackson Pollock in 2000’s “Pollock,” with a cigarette perpetually dangling from his mouth as he hovers over his latest creation. 

And the same things that were wrong with “Pollock” also plague “Big Bad Love.” 

The movie catalogues Leon’s self-destructive behavior without hinting at its origin. We’re simply expected to accept that that’s the way he is, which makes it difficult to sympathize or connect with him on any level. 

And because it’s based on a series of short stories, “Big Bad Love” feels fragmented. There’s no driving story arc — just episodes, then the closing credits. 

Maybe Howard should have made a movie based on a different Larry Brown, the Philadelphia 76ers coach whose run-ins on the court with Allen Iverson would make more interesting movie fodder than Leon’s run-ins with himself. 

“Big Bad Love,” is rated R.